Work Text:
Part 1: Woof Woof Woof Woof Woof Woof Woof
(dog for: forgive me father for I have sinned)
What does he want today? A son or a dog?
Dean’s not going to raise his head until he’s sure. Instead he keeps on digging, pawing, through his duffle, reaching for the pants-turned-shorts he’s pretty sure he wore his last (it turns out) day of school. Sam, an arsenal of paper and textbooks spread defensively around him on his bed, is behind him, scratching homework into his notebook, somehow making it an insult and a countdown all in one. Minutes, months, or years, Dean doesn’t know, he just hears the ticking.
John, slumped against the wall next to the tv in the room’s one chair, watches them both, sweat trickling down the side of his face, fingers curling round the neck of a bottle, fixing for a fight. He’s going to get it too. Whether it’s a fight of words or actions remains to be seen. Hence (a high school word if there ever was one) the question:
A dog or a son? What’s he in the mood for?
“I don’t care if you’ve got some friend who’ll hand it in for you, I’m not stopping tomorrow morning to drop that shit off.” It’s hard to gauge the blood alcohol content in that steady voice. Several traffic cops have no doubt been fooled. Dean listens hard though, and he’d say .8. If anyone ever asks he’ll lie and say his dad’s sober as a priest, but he’ll be thinking: I’m hearing at a frequency you can’t even imagine. Can’t see the colour red anymore but at least I hear the words my dad’s really saying. Speaking of…
“So take the fucking night off Sammy – s ’not like it’s getting graded.”
A son then.
That doesn’t make Dean relax any. Dogs don’t get to relax, they just slink off to their dog houses and watch the light streaming through the kitchen window and the shadows that move across it and try to remember what warm hands feel like until the words run dry and they’re called back in so they can finish what the son started.
Lucky boy.
He finds the jeans, the box, and the lump still in the pocket, slides them into his palm, and edges his way towards the door. Waits for his moment. He doesn’t have to wait long.
“I’m going to give it to my next school,” Sam doesn’t even bother to look up, and his squeaky little voice drips with bile. “That way they’ll know I take my future seriously.”
“Oh you do, do you?” John snorts, and Dean’s inclined to agree: he would not describe Sam’s current behaviour as exactly future orientated.
“Well someone has to,” Sam’s voice kicks up an octave, and Dean twitches in solidarity with thirteen-year-olds everywhere, and the anger he remembers from such bodily betrayals. “Seeing as my own dad won’t even let me finish a school year in the same place I started.”
Time to start counting in dog years, Sammy.
“Schools round here are shit anyway,” John grunts. “I’m doin’ you a favour.”
Dean wants to know when Sam will be old enough to spot what John’s doing – if he’ll ever learn to hear the pitch where the truth lives. Not anytime soon, he thinks, as Sam finally puts down his pen, glaring at John the same way a cat might glare at a tiger.
Dean should probably do something: get between them before they can shout loud enough for the neighbours to hear; remind John why he has a dog in the first place. But if John wanted that he would’ve picked a fight with Dean, not wound Sam up with callous words and pointed grunts. Dean’s never been able to defuse him when he’s in this sort of mood – has yet to figure out what the right thing to say is.
Hard when all you know is woof woof.
So instead, Dean takes his chance; yanks open the door and steps into the night, cutting Sam off mid-sentence.
“You’re the wor –”
Out you go, boy!
It feels good to fill his lungs with air that doesn’t smell of teenage boy sweat and stale semen. Maybe that was part of the problem. If the room didn’t smell so bad, if the AC was working, if the TV wasn’t busted, then maybe it could’ve been a room and not a warzone. Maybe then John wouldn’t have felt the need to douse himself in alcohol and hand Sam the match.
It’s hot (summer, Arizona, desert) and the car (when he leans against it) almost burns. He opens the box of cigarettes (Julian’s cigarettes that Dean had (it turns out) stolen with a wink and a kiss and a playful ‘just borrowin’ these for the weekend’, not realising then the weekend was never going to end) and sticks one in his mouth, watching the shape of his brother gesticulate through the window’s shitty blinds.
Dean doesn’t have a doghouse and a kitchen window to watch shadows through: he’s got a car to lean on, a pack of accidentally stolen cigarettes and a motel parking lot that’s giving over to desert at the edges.
He lights up and takes a few mindless drags, eyes on the door. They won’t notice he’s gone yet – won’t for a while if the pink of Sam’s cheeks, the curl of John’s smile, were anything to go by.
He wishes Sam would learn to pick his battles – or would at least admit that he’s not going to win. Maybe Dean should be proud of his fighting spirit or whatever, he’s sure it’s going to come in handy one of these days, but Dean had really just wanted the night off. He’d wanted to give into the itch, which had meant a John that was alert and mostly sober. Then Dean could’ve wandered up to the edge of the carpark, where the wind had eroded the concrete and sand filled the cracks. He could’ve passed over the invisible boundary and onto the flat.
He had just wanted to stand somewhere where the sky was big and blue and everything else was small and he could pretend to be far away.
It would be hot too, he thinks. Hotter than right now. There in the desert, the real desert, under the sun, it would be so hot that his tears (the precious and sparkling salt) would dry up before they could leave his eyes and he wouldn’t have to worry about keeping them at bay.
Dogs don’t cry.
Julian thought it was funny. He’d grown up here, was already bored of yellow sand and sun: dreamed of rain and trees and grey skies. Dean told him about Oregon – about the half-built house John had rented for less than cheap and the mushrooms Sam had found growing on his homework. About the shouting match that had led to here, dumped in the desert, drinking and naked in the back of a truck.
They had agreed on beaches in the end – sand for Dean and sea for Julian. Julian was good at bullshit (wanted to be a writer) and he’d made it sound like it could be real.
Silly dog.
There, naked in the back of Julian’s truck, with his hands in Julian’s long hair (both a little dizzy and sick with the taste of each other underneath the stolen whisky and cigarettes) it was easy to forget about the class they were blowing off, about Julian’s grandma and her secret whisky, his mom and the gun under her bed. Easy to forget about John and his absent presence, Sam and his sun burn, the gun under Dean’s bed and the things he’d killed with it, Oregon, Wyoming, the smoke, the nuns, and everything else that had led to them; and everything else that was coming.”
Stupid dog.
There, in the back of that rusting truck, they had pretended there was a beach outside and nothing else – a place where sand met water.
Look: that dog thinks it can swim!
Now, Dean blows smoke across the desert and tries to think about nothing. Sam and John are still arguing – one voice low, the other high, a muffled choir with lousy harmonies through the door.
“Hey kid,” a voice breaks through it all. “You got a spare?”
Part 2: The best accommodation the American Association of School Administrators can provide.
The most offensive thing is the colour. Even with the lights off it’s eyewatering to the point of migraine.
Alma tries staring up at the ceiling, but the walls still crowd at the corner of her vision, flickering and threatening like a fire – a lime green fire. It’s hot in this room, she’s sweated through her cheap suit, and there’s sand in the carpet. The rumble of voices next door is loud enough to be annoying but not loud enough to follow. The only channel with decent signal is showing a Jeopardy re-run that (god help her) Alma’s managed to see enough times to remember all the answers.
And the worst thing is still the colour.
Her eyes, when she closes them, are dry and itchy, and all the talk of pot and crack and teenage intravenous drug use hasn’t left her in much of a mood for sleep. She sticks a hand half-heartedly down her pants, but then she thinks about teen pregnancy statistics which (unsurprisingly) makes her drier than the desert outside. And besides it’s too hot.
Plus the colour. Maybe that’s why they chose it.
She could call her sister, see how Scully is doing, but she wouldn’t be able to ask about the cat until at least ten minutes in, and she doesn’t want to hear about church or Cathy or whatever else has Emily pissed off this week.
She wishes she’d thought to pick up beer at the gas station, that she hadn’t smoked her last Marlborough in the car behind the conference centre, ducking her head guiltily as the actually upstanding teachers had filtered off towards the airport.
She should’ve just toughed out a plane.
A door slams and she jerks her eyes open, then winces. The walls, somehow, have gotten even worse. The voices next door are louder now – loud enough to separate into distincts. One is high and righteous, the other low and contemptuous.
Alma’s been doing her job long enough to know the rumble of family dramas and she’s been doing her job long enough to know this will go on for hours. She wonders if it’s worth invoking her mandatory reporter status this early on, a pre-emptive call to the police might mean she can sleep, and maybe one of the officers on the scene will smoke.
The familiar hiss of a lighter pulls her out of her thoughts. It’s followed by a long sigh then silence. Through the shitty, broken, blinds she can see a small glowing ember, and it’s the brightest (and best) thing she’s seen all day.
She eases herself to her feet, slips the ugly shoes she bought for the conference back on and hobbles to the door.
The kid (shit) is too lost in his own broody thoughts to even notice at first. His eyes are on the closed door and the argument behind it. He’s tall, skinny-ish, with hair cut a bit too short to be fashionable. There’s sweat stains on his t-shirt, and his shorts are ripped. He’s freckled rather than tanned and she can tell he’s not been that careful with his sunscreen, if the peeling skin on his nose and the back of his neck are any indication. He’s not wearing any shoes. His cigarettes are on the roof of the shiny black car he’s leaning against, and her fingers itch at the site of them. She’s glad, so fucking glad, that this kid, this motel, are both so far outside her educational jurisdiction.
“Hey kid,” she tries to make it sound casual, like it’s totally normal to ask teenagers for cigarettes. “Got a spare?”
He jerks around, covering his surprise well, and takes her in.
“I dunno, Ma’am,” he says, and she can tell he’s using his best ‘caught under the bleachers’ voice. “I don’t wanna get you, like, fired.”
“You go to school in Denver, Colorado?” Alma’s learned to stop being offended at the way kids can tell she’s a teacher. With her green polyester pant suits (‘like if Hillary Clinton was Asian and also shopped at Walmart’ is how a particularly creative delinquent had described her) and her own unfashionably short haircuts (‘kinda makes you look like a dyke Miss, no offense’) it’s basically inevitable. Helpful, in some ways, except when she wants to get laid.
“Not yet,” the kid shrugs.
“Then I think we’re good, don’t you?”
“Sure,” the kid passes her the box and his lighter. “Why the hell not.”
She takes them gratefully and leans back against her own car – a battered and dusty Honda that’s the same colour as her suit. She laughs when she sees the brand.
“Camels,” she takes one, considers sneaking a second into her pocket but decides that might be a touch too pitiful, even for her. “Y’know I had to listen to so many talks about this today. On how you kids think Joe Camel and Mickey Mouse are friends, and that’s why you’re all addicted to crack.”
“They aren’t?” The kid asks in half-hearted mock surprise, back to watching the door. “I’ve been lied to. Guess it’s time to stop doing crack.”
“It feels good to be good at my job,” the kid snorts at that, and Alma hides her smile by bringing the lighter up to her mouth. “I’m Alma, by the way.”
“Dean,” the kid accepts the lighter and cigarettes back with a quick nod, though his head whips back towards the door at a particularly loud rumble from within. Alma thinks she catches the word ‘ungrateful' before the noise subsides to a less interpretable level.
“That your ride?” She nods towards the car that’s taking most of the kid’s, Dean’s, weight right now. “It looks cool.”
“My dad’s,” the kid frowns.
“He the one in there? Who’s he arguing with?”
“My brother.” The kid finishes his first cigarette, flicks the stub onto the ground. She half expects him to go back inside but he doesn’t, just tilts his head back against the car and lets the last of the smoke rise up. They’re far away enough from the city that you can actually see the stars, but somehow Alma doesn’t think that’s what Dean’s doing. “What’s a teacher from Denver, Colorado doing all the way out here?”
“Big teacher conference,” Alma shrugs. “In Pheonix.”
“Motels’re probably nicer in Phoenix.”
“Yeah, probably,” Alma sighs. “I don’t like flying: the AASA said they’d cover my gas if I slummed it.”
“Doesn’t seem fair,” Dean gives her the offended look of teenagers everywhere when they hear of a small interpersonal injustice. It’s touching really. “Those things are deathtraps.”
“Probably why they’re so cheap,” Alma taps the bonnet of her car affectionately. “I’ll stick to the four wheeled death traps personally. Better a blaze of petrol fuelled glory than falling out the sky.”
Dean laughs up into the night, then looks a bit surprised at himself. Alma supposes his interactions with teachers aren’t generally so positive. She doesn’t think she’d like him if he were her student, he seems like the kind of kid that comes burdened with paperwork and detentions.
The argument has been ebbing and flowing in the background of their conversation, and Alma tries (because she’s always been a nosy bitch) to tune back into it. Dean, no doubt more used to the voices, seems to be following it with a weary familiarity. He reaches for his Camels, lights another one. Alma finishes hers, and Dean offers her the box. She takes another. They smoke in silence for a little while.
“We’re moving,” Dean says eventually. “Again. Sam’s…he’s not happy.”
“He likes it here, then?”
“No, that’s the stupid thing,” Dean says. “He fucking hates the sun. He’s thirteen and just started to need deodorant, but the AC in our room doesn’t work, and we haven’t had much money for laundry so all his clothes stink. And he says the sunscreen gives him spots, so he won’t wear it, and now half the skin on his arms is peeling off. He’s been in a bad mood since we got here, and then dad showed back up early and pulled us out of school, and now Sam’s really pissed. He has some project due Monday that he won’t get to turn in now and he’s let dad wind him up about it.” He’s panting a little at the end there, a bit nonplussed at the amount of words that have just tumbled out his mouth.
“The AC’s out in my room too,” Alma offers, trying to sort through the three hundred or so red flags that stuck out to her in his little tirade. She’s already decided this is out of her jurisdiction, and it doesn’t seem fair, after the kindness (cigarettes) that Dean’s shown her, to immediately return to her room and phone CPS. “And the walls are fucking lime green: genuinely enough to give me a headache. They like that in yours?”
“No,” the look on Dean’s face is gratifyingly horrified. “They’re just, like, cream. Thank god or else me n’Sammy probably would’ve killed each other by now.”
“How do you feel?” she decides to prod a little, gently. “About leaving?”
“Knew it was coming,” Dean tries to shrug, but it comes off as more of a twitch. “We never stay anywhere for long, and I don’t really care about school. Barely went while we were here. I like it here though. I like the desert.”
“Must get lonely,” Alma tries to sound casual. “Always being somewhere new. Your dad having trouble these days? I know lots of people are.”
“Lady,” Dean’s voice has gone hard. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about us so leave off. We’re fine,” his statement is punctuated by another loud shout, this one high pitched and ‘shut up’ shaped, and she watches as Dean closes his eyes takes a long drag of his cigarette before continuing. “It’s just a bad night is all,” he says eventually. “Most of the time it’s…” he trails off. “Most of the time we’re fine,” he finishes firmly.
“Alright,” Alma holds her hands up in a placating gesture. She knows a lost cause when she sees one, and god knows she’s seen enough. They never sting any less, she’s just gotten used to it. “I’m sorry. I forget, sometimes, to not be in teacher mode.”
“S ’fine.”
“The desert,” Alma nods towards it after the silence has sat between them for a little while. “Did you know it used to be underwater?”
“What?” Dean whips his head around, mouth slightly open. “When?”
“Oh, like millions and millions of years ago,” Alma can’t help but smile. “Before the dinosaurs even. But they still find fossils out there sometimes of shells and fish and stuff like that.”
“Huh, Julian never said anything about it.”
“Julian?”
“Oh,” Dean tenses, and she thinks he must be choosing his words carefully. “Just a friend I made from school.”
“I thought you barely went?” Alma teases.
“I went enough to make a friend.” Dean says defensively. “He grew up here, and we talked about the sea a lot. You think he would’ve mentioned it.”
“Well, if he skips school as much as you do he might’ve missed that lesson.”
“You’re kinda rude for a teacher,” Dean’s smiling so she assumes this is a compliment.
“It’s a Friday evening, I’m sharing cigarettes with a teenager, and I’m about eight hundred miles from my superintendent so I think –” Alma cuts off as words begin to burst through the doorway, clear as a conversation.
“That’s enough, Sam!” Dean’s father has a voice like a bull, and she sees the way it makes Dean straighten, the almost done cigarette thrown swiftly underneath the car. “I’m your father and –”
“So what?” Sam has a voice like a leaky balloon and the reckless bravery of a matador. “It’s not like you’re ever here! Why can’t you just leave us alone?”
“Don’t you –”
“I mean it! We were doing fine here before you showed back up.”
“You’ll do fine in the next place so stop whining.”
Sam’s mutter is too quiet to hear through the door. Too quiet for his dad too apparently because his tone switches abruptly to sarcastic, though he keeps on shouting. Alma wonders if he’s drunk: too drunk to notice when he’s loud and when he’s not.
“What was that? Say it where I can hear it, boy.”
“I said it’s easy for you to say!” Sam explodes with a force akin to a nuclear bomb. Alma’s surprised the ground doesn’t shake. “You’re gonna leave as soon as you can anyway. You won’t have to deal with a new school and new teachers! Or whatever craphole you dump us in! And you won’t be the one putting up with Dean’s moping over his stupid boyfriend.”
The words seem to ring out across the desert, the blast wave enough to send Dean back against his car. He squeezes his eyes shut, and Alma takes an instinctual step towards him, but stops well outside touching distance. The voices inside are back to rumbles, though Alma doubts they’ll stay that way for much longer.
“Dean,” she says softly, hesitating. She’s on the verge of overstepping several legal and professional boundaries and she thinks she should care more about that than she does. “Do you need to hide in my room? Do I need to call someone?”
Dean looks at her and opens his mouth, and she’s honestly not sure what he’s about to say, when the door to his room swings open, and a diminutive, greasy figure edges out into the night.
“Dean,” it must be Sam. He looks, at least, contrite. “Um…dad wants to speak to you. Now.”
Dean jerks his head towards his brother, his gaze ending up somewhere above Sam’s head and straightens up. He scrubs a hand over his face. “Alright. You just wait out here.”
“Ok,” Sam nods, and Alma thinks he might be about to cry. “Um…I told dad about –”
“Yeah,” Dean cuts him off stonily. “I heard that bit.”
“Sorry,” Sam ducks his head. “I didn’t think, didn’t realise he would –”
“Whatever,” Dean interrupts again. “How did you find out, anyway?”
“I saw you get into this truck one day and I was worried. So I followed you and…”
“Right,” Dean sighs, walking towards the door. “Nosy runt. As always.”
“Dean, please, I’m –”
“Save it, Sammy. Just wait out here with the nice lady,” Dean jerks a patronising hand at Alma. “Don’t come back in until I say you can.”
“What’s he gonna do to you?” Sam sounds very small, and Dean finally looks at him, his whole-body drooping with sudden exhaustion.
“Nothing, Sammy,” he says, and Alma knows he’s lying. “He just wants to talk.”
And then he is gone, closing the door firmly behind him.
Part 3: But one of these day I’m gonna wriggle up on dry land.
Sam goes on hunts, sometimes, and they feel like this. Always Dean’s back, shrinking into some danger that Sam’s somehow hasn’t noticed yet. Those times, at least, he had his gun. All he has now is his shitty pen that’s left ink stains all over his fingers and blankets. The sweat that just pours and pours and pours out of him these days has made it slippery, and he’s clutched it so tight there are indents on his fingers.
“Hey kid?” It’s the woman. She’s maybe forty, Asian, with short dark hair and a couple greys. She’s dressed like a personal injury lawyer Sam saw on a billboard in Missouri and she’s watching him with a strange mix of pity and disappointment. “D’you feel better now you’ve let it all out?”
“No,” Sam says sullenly, picking his way carefully across the concrete. It’s still warm from the day’s sun and he’s barefoot. “It was an accident, y’know.”
“Of course,” the woman laughs. “You’re a thirteen-year-old boy: everything you do is an accident.”
“That’s not…” Sam takes Dean’s spot, leaning against the impala. There’s a pack of cigarettes on the roof. The woman, following his gaze, picks up the pack and takes one nonchalantly, watching him, waiting. “…Dean’s had boyfriends before,” Sam isn’t sure why he wants to explain himself to this random woman, but he does. “Dad never said anything last time.”
“He didn’t say anything to you,” the woman corrects, lighting up. “Doesn’t mean he never said anything to your brother.”
“But –”
“Your dad’s a bully, kid,” the woman blows smoke towards the door. “Trust me, my whole job is dealing with bullies: I know ‘em when I hear ‘em. And bullies, they like to have an audience sometimes, but most of the time they like to work without witnesses.”
“You’re a teacher?” Sam asks, a little out of sorts. He’s never met a teacher that likes Dean more than him before. “No offense but I think my dad’s in a different league than footballers shoving kids in lockers or cheerleaders giving each other eating disorders.”
“Yeah, sure.” The woman nods. “I’m not tryna diminish what you’re dealing with: it’s abuse, but it’s abuse when it happens in schools too, we just like to pretend it’s not so it doesn’t matter that we’re fucking useless. Bullies they get older, but apart from that they stay the same. They like little worlds – that’s why they do so well in school. Now some of ‘em, when they grow up, learn to be in the same world as the rest of us and they end up nice enough. But others, they find new little worlds to live in: police stations, hospitals, churches, families. Your dad –” she gestures around the parking lot “– I’d say he’s done a pretty good job. What’s in your world, Sam? You, Dean, and your dad? A road, a car, and a motel room?”
Sam opens his mouth to speak, to argue, but shuts it again when something glass hits something in his room and shatters. They both wait, tense and quivering, but there are no other sounds – no shouts or pleas or whimpers. At least, none that Sam can hear under the beating of his heart.
“And what am I supposed to do?” Sam asks eventually. He’s tired now, and he wants to go to bed, wants this day, this town, to be over. He doesn’t get this lady, with her ugly clothes and her mean words and her smelly cigarettes. “None of this is my fault.”
“I know,” for the first time the lady looks at him like an adult. “And if you were my student and we were in my office, I’d have to tell you a bunch of lies like: ‘tell a teacher and it will get better’ or ‘if you fight back you’re just as bad.’ Lucky we’re not in my office, eh?”
“You aren’t going to tell me to hit my dad, are you?” Sam asks dubiously.
“God no,” the woman laughs. “You don’t fight a bully unless you know you’re gonna win. You see that happening anytime soon?”
“No,” Sam thinks about all the guns in the trunk of the car. “Probably never.”
“Then you’ve got one option I can see,” her cigarette finished, the woman flicks the ember onto the ground between them.
“What?”
“Wait,” the woman says. “Wait and keep your head down. Stay in school, get good grades. Let your legs get a little longer, a little faster. Let your voice get a little deeper. Then you run. Run as fast as you fucking can, as far as you fucking can. You make your own world, Sam, and you make it big enough that your dad can’t touch you.”
“And how long until I can do that?” It’s easy for her to say, Sam thinks, with her job and her car and her grey hairs, and her voice that commands respect. When was the last time she had to wait for anything? “How long am I going to have to wait?”
“It’s gonna be years,” the woman acknowledges. “And it’s gonna feel endless, but it’s not, I promise. Everything ends eventually, kid, even childhood.”
Part 4: It’s a small world, but not if you’re the one who cleans it.
The room’s gotten worse. Smaller, darker, warmer. The smell of sweat is stronger. Dean closes the door and waits for his next command.
John grunts, pointing to the space in front of him, the narrow gap between his legs and the bed.
Heel.
It’s a good spot, for John’s purposes at least. Dean can’t back away without falling onto Sam’s homework, and any attempt to sidestep one of John’s hands (if it comes to that) will put him in the path of the other. Every instinct, every nerve ending, Dean has are warning him away from the obvious trap. He ignores them, and steps between his father’s legs.
Good doggy.
“I guess school’s an even bigger waste of time for you than I thought.” When he’s this close, it’s impossible not to smell the whisky on John’s breath. “Seein’ as you can’t seem to read between the fucking lines.”
And Dean knows what John is getting at, because he’s actually pretty good in english lit when the books are interesting, and he has time to do his homework instead of digging up graves. And John is not (was not) exactly subtle with his lessons. So Dean, in the freezing of Wyoming (where his hands had shaken so badly and the wind had been so strong that he’d had to lie on the icy ground and lower his upper-half into the grave (his face close enough to the skulls to see the cracks) before the matches would stay lit) had got the message loud and clear.
No son of mine…
“He’s just a friend, dad,” Dean tries weakly, and John’s nostrils flair dangerously.
“Sam told you?” He asks, and Dean realises his mistake too late. He wasn’t supposed to know what this was about, was supposed to flounder, to incriminate himself, to chase after fake tennis balls not realising the real one was in John’s fist. Dean had missed the first fake throw, had come straight up to John’s hand and sniffed.
Bad dog.
“I, uh…” it’s tempting (more tempting than it should be) to turn it back on Sam, bring the thirteen-year-old back into the mess he made. But Dean’s a good dog. He knows the hands he can bite and the ones he can’t. “…I heard through the door.”
John grunts his displeasure at that but doesn’t comment further. Instead, he sits, glaring at Dean, no less intimidating for the way the whisky makes him waver. He’s waiting, Dean knows, for Dean to crack, to tell him some shameful version of the truth that can form the basis of his next lesson.
Roll over, dog. Show me your belly.
Dean’s not going to fall for that again, even though a part of him wants to, and badly. The boy in him wants to sit on the bed opposite his father and be teased, cajoled, into giving up the story, the way he would’ve if Julian were a girl. The boy in him wants to hiss, to beg, to talk of notes in class and borrowed pens, of imaginary beaches and rusty trucks. Wants John to crack, to admit, to accept it this time around. The boy in him wants to pretend that John can be reasoned with. The dog in him, halfway in a grave with a bone in his mouth, is just cold.
Roll over.
Dean’s not going to fall for it, not again. He’s not going to let Julian get used against him. He wants to keep this place, this desert with its warmth and its sun, safe, so he waits too, dropping his eyes to the floor. There’s a stain on the carpet that’s almost star shaped and he looks at it until it’s burned on the inside of his eyes when he blinks.
He hears John lift the bottle for another drink, bringing it back to the table with a too hard tap.
“So,” he says, and the word is slightly slurred now. Dean raises his eyes to the bottle to check its level. Mostly gone. “What exactly about Wyoming didn’t sink in?”
“It did, sir,” Dean tries to keep his voice steady.
“Then how the hell –” John leans forward, close enough for Dean to see the sweat on his temples. “– have we ended up back here?”
“I tried,” Dean whispers, miserable and ashamed, eyes dropping to the floor, trying to find the star again. “I tried dad.”
He had tried, that was the worst part. He had tried so hard. He’d done ok in Oregon, where the rain and John had washed in and out with enough regularity to keep him inside. He’d thought he was past it, and John had agreed, had left them here to dry out. And Dean had kept his head down, had been doing fine, until third period (history) when Julian had sat next to him and asked to borrow a pen.
A hand comes down hard on the back of his neck and he jumps. Thick fingers, strangely gentle, tug at his hair until he’s looking back up into his father’s face. John doesn’t look angry, that’s the strange thing. He looks drunk, mostly, and sad.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Dean,” he says softly, breath stinging Dean’s face. “I can’t lose you.”
What’s a man without his dog?
“You won’t,” Dean whispers. “I promise.”
“You need to promise me that this won’t happen again,” the fingers in his hair tighten, stopping his head from moving. John won’t let him look away. “That in the next town you’ll be normal. Can you promise me that?”
“I…” Dean should just lie. He’s good at lying, it should be easy. But he doesn’t want to have to lie to his dad. “…It’s not bad, dad. I’m not bad.”
“Dean,” John growls, shaking Dean’s head. “Promise me.”
“I can’t.”
The hand in his hair is gone, now there are two on his shoulders, pushing him down onto the ground.
Sit.
Dean’s too big, really, to fit in the cramped space between the bed and John’s legs, but he goes down anyway, clumsily. He loses his balance and sprawls on his ass, head bouncing off the cheap mattress. John is standing, looming, over him, a face like stone, hands clenched into fists.
You’ve done it now, dog.
“I was being kind before,” John says softly, but the voice still carries. “Giving you a choice, a chance, to be a man about this.”
Stay on the ground, dog.
“Dad, I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” Dean knows John’s anger well enough to hear the hurt under it and it’s baffling. He doesn’t understand why John hates this, him, so much. “If you were you would do what you’re told.”
“I can’t,” Dean says again. “It’s part of me dad, it’s part of who I am.”
“No,” John hisses, he sits back down on the chair heavily, fumbling for the whisky. “You’re a hunter, you’re a Winchester. This –” he sweeps a hand out and down, encompassing Dean, the stained carpet, and whatever else “– is just a phase.”
No dog of mine.
“It doesn’t feel like a phase. It feels real, really real. And it doesn’t make me weak or make it so I can’t hunt or take care of Sammy. I can still do all that, I’m still me.” Dean gets his legs under him cautiously, but John lets him rise, lets him perch on the end of the bed. “Julian…” it feels sacrilegious to say his name out loud in this room. “…he makes me happy, dad. He…we get each other. I just don’t see how it, he, could be –”
It's only because John is drunk enough for the pull of his arm to be slow, and only because there’s just enough whisky left in the bottle to catch the light as it soars through the air, that Dean is able to throw himself down onto the bed in time, throw his arms up around his face.
The bottle hits the wall and shatters. Dean can’t see, but he can feel the whisky and glass dance across his arms, his hair. The alcohol starts to evaporate quickly from the heat of his skin, leaving a sticky residue behind. It itches, but he doesn’t dare scratch, doesn’t dare move, until he hears John’s long sigh, the creak of the chair as he sits back in it. Only then does he sit up gingerly, the light tinkle of glass lost under the ringing of his ears.
No dogs on the bed.
John is slumped back against the wall, at an angle, staring dourly at the wet spot behind Dean, the little drops of whisky edging their way down towards the carpet.
“What a waste,” he mumbles, scrubbing a hand across his face. “Clean it up.”
Dean rolls slowly to the side, ignoring the little pinpricks as glass pokes into the skin of his arms and legs. Sam’s homework is ruined; the is paper torn and wet, and the ink hopelessly smudged. Looking at it makes Dean angry, and he shoves it into a damp, sticky ball as quickly as he can, heedless of the way the ink is staining his hands.
There’s a sharp, slicing, pain on his palm, and he holds the wad up closer until he can see the shard sticking up and out of it, the tip buried in his hand, the paper around it absorbing the blood. He throws it all into the trashcan, wipes his hand on his shirt.
Most of the glass is on the bed, though some has reached the floor. He picks up the bits he can see with his cut hand, dropping them into the trash one at a time. Counting the muffled sounds as they hit the bottom helps his breathing even out a little.
He’s got a last little handful when John lurches to his feet, making Dean jump, another little cut opening on his finger. John stands behind him, swaying slightly, Dean doesn’t dare turn around. A hand comes down heavy on his head and he flinches, nearly buckles. John doesn’t notice, just pets him absently.
Good dog.
“I can’t lose you,” he says, the words almost lost to exhaustion and alcohol. “I can’t.”
And the dog in Dean knows what he means, that what he’s really saying is:
I can’t change, so you have to.
So he nods and murmurs ‘Ok, dad.” And hopes that John won’t remember this tomorrow. The hand in his hair stills, and John sniffs.
“I don’t know where you got ‘em,” he says, more alert than he was a second ago. “But I better not catch you smoking again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get some sleep,” John turns away from him then, pulling off his shirt and jeans. “You’re driving tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This whole state’s lousy with monsters, enough to keep busy for the next while,” John lays himself down across the other bed, throwing an arm over his face, already fading into sleep. “Flagstaff’s pretty cheap.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean says, not quite numb enough to ignore the sting in John’s words. Flagstaff’s only a couple hours north, just far away enough to be in a new school district. He wonders if he’ll bother going this time, it doesn’t feel likely. He wonders how far away John will be when Sam figures out what’s going on. The pain in his hand jerks him from his thoughts: he’s still holding glass in his clenched fist.
Silly dog. Can’t hunt with a broken paw.
Part 5: The moral of the story is that God hates a try hard.
Alma’s ready to go inside, has been ready to go inside for a while, so the door opening fills her with a queasy mix of relief and dread.
“Dean!” Sam runs up to his brother, who brushes past him towards the car. “Are you ok? You’re bleeding! What did he –”
“It was an accident, Sammy,” Dean interrupts, casting a dark look towards Alma. “I’m fine.”
“Did he hit you?” Sam tries to edge closer to his brother, who pushes him back impatiently, pulling some car keys from a pocket and wrenching the boot of the car open.
“No, can you stop being so fucking nosy for once?” Dean snaps, and Sam goes still and small immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he says to his brother’s shoulders as he roots through the car for something. “I really didn’t mean to–”
“Just shut up Sam!” Dean’s words echo across the parking lot. “I don’t wanna hear it.”
“But–”
“Here,” Dean emerges, arms full, and shoves a soft, cylindrical thing at Sam. “Dad’s in my bed, and yours is wet and probably full of glass. You’ll need a sleeping bag.” He dives back into the car, voice slightly muffled. “There’s a roll mat somewhere in here too. Should fit between your bed and the wall.”
“What about you?” Sam asks, clutching the sleeping bag close to his chest, his face a mixture of stricken and angry. It’s an adult expression, and it hurts something in Alma’s chest to see it on such a young face. “Where’re you gonna go?”
Dean drops the roll mat at Sam’s feet, pulling the lid of the trunk down with a heavy finality. He has a pair of hiking boots in his other hand. For a second his eyes are distant, then he smiles grimly at some private joke. “Guess I’ll just sleep on the floor.”
“Dean no I can –”
“It doesn’t matter, Sam,” Dean pushes him towards the door. “Just go in there, brush your teeth and go to sleep.”
“Where are you going?” Sam’s looking at the shoes and there’s an almost hysterical edge to his voice, as he drops the sleeping bag and mat. “Please don’t leave me here, Dean, please I can’t.”
Dean softens and stops, pulling Sam in for a hug. “I’m not going far, just need to clear my head. You sleep, ok? And then you can wake me up in the morning, before dad, and we can go get breakfast.”
“You promise?” Sam whispers into his brother’s bloodstained t-shirt.
“Yeah, I promise.” Dean picks up the sleeping stuff and opens the door. “I’ll see you soon.”
Once his younger brother is gone, Dean’s shoulder’s droop and he lets out a long sigh, before he shoves his feet into his shoes.
“Dean…” Alma starts, not quite sure what she’s about to offer.
“Lady,” Dean says harshly. “If you call the police or anything like that, I’m gonna say you tried to bribe me to your room with cigarettes,” he turns to glare at her, the ferocity of his gaze only slightly undermined by the tears in his eyes. “I’ll say enough shit to get you put on so many lists you aren’t allowed in the same goddamn county as a school again.”
“Jeez,” Alma keeps the hurt off her face and out her voice, but only just. “I was just gonna ask if you wanted an extra pillow from my room.”
“Oh,” Dean ducks his head, embarrassed. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“I’ll leave it outside the door for you,” she’s proud of herself for the quick save. “Hopefully it won’t get too sandy.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re gonna be ok, Dean,” Alma says softly. “This won’t last forever.”
“Yeah it will,” Dean says with a weary finality that Alma can’t argue against and starts to walk towards the desert. “But thanks. You can keep the cigarettes by the way, I’m quitting.”
Alma watches him go for a while longer, until he disappears among the shadowed rocks and trees. She slips the Camels into her pocket but stops to examine the lighter for the first time. It has a cartoon drawing of a fish skeleton on it.
She makes her way back into her room, assaulted once more by colour, though after everything that’s happened it’s almost comforting, and grabs a pillow from the bed, leaving it propped against the door. She can hear the faint sound of snoring inside, the rustle of a body shifting.
She turns, taking one last look out across the desert. Imagines fish and dinosaurs and everything else that had once been alive there. She hopes that’ll be what she dreams about tonight, but she doubts it.
Distantly something, maybe a dog, howls.